A Month of Cooking at Home

My delivery app knew me too well. It knew my usual order, my usual backup order, and my usual "it's been a long day" order. When an app has three saved personalities for you, something has gone wrong. So: thirty days, no delivery, no eating out except social plans. If I was hungry at home, I was cooking.

Week one: humbling

I burned rice. I know how that sounds — I live in Southeast Asia, rice is a solved problem, there are machines. I burned it anyway (attempting a crispy bottom, achieving charcoal). Dinner took ninety minutes and tasted like an apology. The delivery app sent a push notification that felt personal: "We miss you 😢". Not yet, app. Not yet.

Week two: the system appears

Survival forced structure. Sunday became prep hour: rice cooked, vegetables chopped, two sauces made. Suddenly weeknight cooking dropped to fifteen minutes — chop, fry, eat. I stopped following recipes exactly and started following the shape of them: something salty, something sour, something crunchy, fire. That formula covers about 80% of Cambodian home cooking and, honestly, 80% of happiness.

Cooking isn't a talent. It's about fifteen small skills, and you collect one per week just by showing up hungry.

Week three: the plot twist

Somewhere around day 18, cooking stopped being the obstacle to dinner and became the good part of the evening. Chopping vegetables is weirdly meditative when you stop rushing it — a phone-free half hour with a knife and something sizzling. My kuy teav auntie remains untouchable, to be clear. But my fried rice developed... a reputation. A small one. Among two friends. I'm taking it.

The numbers, because I kept them

• Money: roughly 60% less spent on food. That's real money — latte-fund money.
• Time: after week two, cooking averaged 20 minutes vs. 35 waiting for delivery. Cooking is literally faster. I checked three times.
• Energy: the 3 PM slump softened again. Between this and the alarm experiment, my body is apparently just a machine that wants boring, regular inputs.
• Screen time: down another 25 minutes a day, because scrolling-while-waiting-for-delivery was a whole hidden category.

What survived the month

The apps are still deleted — they live in the crowded folder of exiled apps, next to social media and the alarm clock. Delivery still happens on genuinely chaotic days, ordered through the browser, as a decision instead of a reflex. That's the pattern with every experiment on this blog, I'm realizing: the goal is never zero. The goal is turning defaults back into choices.

Also, I can now make crispy rice on purpose. Growth.

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